Gardening is my solace. Watching new stuff happen in the garden is a metaphor for life. Everything happens in a garden. Let’s all get out and plant some shit!l ~ Ron Finley

Fashion designer and “gangsta gardener” Ron Finley has a vision for how communities should live and work together. Ron’s do-it-yourself remedy for his South Central L. A. food prison, where, by design, residents have to escape in order to find healthy food, was to plant fruit trees and vegetables on the parkway outside his house, and share his harvest with neighbors. In violation of the city’s parkway ordinance, Finley was cited and fined. His 2013 TEDTalk about urban gardening, with 2 million views and still rising, made him an international star.

Ron has spoken recently at symposia in Copenhagen and in Sheffield, England, and has just been named a “Good Food Champion of Los Angeles.” Ron’s relentless efforts have helped reshape Los Angeles’s parkway ordinance and, most recently, a proposal for an urban farming plan. His poetic vision has seized popular imagination and has, as one Orange County developer puts it, ‘changed land use laws.’ Ron talks in his backyard garden and nursery about his ideas and plans.

Locked OutThe Oregonian’s Brad Schmidt spent months analyzing data and interviewing experts for this series on the failure of local governments and agencies to fulfill a fundamental goal of the nation’s 44-year-old Fair Housing Act: to give everyone, regardless of color, a fair shot at living in a decent neighborhood. Schmidt’s investigation found that taxpayer money meant to help break down segregation and poverty is instead reinforcing it. Housing is subsidized in the poorest neighborhoods and often in areas with above-average minority populations. And few poor people and people of color get to live in desirable communities such as inner Southeast Portland and Lake Oswego

The Oregonian met resistance in seeking public records for this series. Portland Housing Bureau officials released project-specific data for more than 150 projects only under pressure from the Multnomah County district attorney’s office. City officials charged the newspaper $1,162 for the information.